DevOps Engineer Salary: Full Guide

It is crucial to get things right in terms of definitions. Instead of being one of many job activities, DevOps expresses a specific culture if not a philosophy. This is a methodology that allows programmers, QA engineers, and sysadmins to work together faster due to automation and seamlessness. Hence, DevOps engineers are the ones who implement such a methodology into workflows. This in itself hints at why the salary of DevOps engineers has to be higher than average.

All stages of the IT working process are potentially covered with DevOps activities:

• At the planning stage, DevOps engineers help decide which architecture is the most appropriate for one or another application. Selecting a proper orchestration system along with a scaling method belongs to the DevOps duties as well. 
• Setting up servers goes next in the process when a development environment is checked.
• Automation of testing goes prior to deployment, and DevOps engineers take part in the process on par with QA specs.
• It is necessary to get feedback from users to make improvements after an application is released. This is a DevOps engineer who should arrange the improvements to be made invisible for the users while an application is updated continuously.
• Dozens of other tasks have to be solved by DevOps engineers to coordinate the workflows of developers, testers, and sysadmins.

Everything mentioned above belongs to almost ideal conditions. In reality, teams often start projects when a planning stage is missed, a wrong architecture is selected, and thought about automation comes to mind after almost everything stops working. Sorting through all those problems to make the project go again is the key competence of DevOps engineers. It is clear that the DevOps specialist salary should reflect the responsibility they have to take. But more on that later.

What is a DevOps engineer?

Typically, a DevOps engineer is a programmer having hands-on experience in testing, deployment, and maintenance of IT products. Besides, managerial skills have to be available to link workflows of different departments. DevOps engineers should adhere to the following basic principles:

• team-wide coherence provides catalyzed development along with the users’ access to the latest updates;
• preventing teams against the diversion to redundant activities should be provided via automation of all processes;
• combination of multidisciplinary specs in one working environment is necessary to exchange various skills and create new approaches on a joint of different competencies;
• assessment of results reflected in the related documentation allows every teammate to access information about the process efficiency;

Meeting those principles is possible if DevOps engineers possess certain skills. They include inter alia:

• programming languages;
• deep expertise in operating systems;
• planning and collaboration;
• configuration management;
• continuous integration;
• setting up cybersecurity;
• dealing with cloud hosting;
• containerization/orchestration of data.

The modern pace of life is stressful as such, not to mention the highly competitive environment of software development. That’s why DevOps engineers have to have certain personal qualities in addition to social stress resistance. Otherwise, they unlikely may claim the high salary of DevOps engineers. Hence, the following compulsory characteristics are to be inherent in every DevOps specialist:

• systems thinking;
• strong attention span;
• good memory;
• sociability;
• advanced engineering outlook;
• responsibility;
• high productivity;
• promptness.

Pros and Cons of Being DevOps

Despite quite an attractive financial compensation paid for the DevOps labor, the position implies some tough aspects that can prevent sysadmins (especially younger ones) from requalifying into DevOps engineers. 

Maintaining a balance between the pros and cons of this job is not too difficult, however. The only thing needed is a clear vision of what DevOps proposes and what it requires. What are the advantages of DevOps?

• Decent salary
• Interesting work
• Strong market demand
• Broad specialization
• Career prospect

At the same time, the following factors can make applicants think twice before taking the job:

• Lifelong training in new technologies;
• Exceptional workload;
• Constant overcoming of difficulties in arranging communication within a team

Even though the drawbacks of the job seem to be less numerous than the advantages are, not every software engineer is capable of exchanging quite ordinary sysadmin duties for the stressful workflow of DevOps. 

How Much DevOps Engineers Are Paid and Why?

The general consensus about the DevOps engineer salary is unequivocal: they are paid generously. But definitions regarding DevOps positions remain questionable in hiring ads. The vacancy descriptions represent different views on both responsibilities of DevOps engineers and the salaries they are promised with.  

The secret is in the correlation between required skills and offered wages. There is a direct relationship between the two: the stronger the higher. It is worth getting to the bottom of the issue to see who is paid for what and how much. Making a certain classification of DevOps competencies wouldn’t go amiss. Let’s classify them through salary levels to recognize where sysadmins end and DevOps engineers begin. 

Level 1: “any key” specialists ($250-600)

The so-called “any key” specs imply tech-savvy admin managers capable of maintaining any kind of office hardware. Such a sort of jack-of-all-trades represents the lowest level of sysadmins who unlikely can be called DevOps by any stretch of the imagination. A “junior sysadmin” is another name of the position that frequently occurs in job ads. Since the proposed salary is quite modest, the required skills are nothing special as well:

• setting up staff member workstations;
• software installation and license management;
• user accounts’ access control;
• technical assistance on computers and peripherals of all types (wi-fi routers, printers, headsets, microphones, slide show projectors, etc);
• maintenance and minor repair of computer hardware;
• procurement of office equipment.

Various small and middle-sized organizations are looking for junior sysadmins. If the company staff includes 10-15 people, the position is proudly called “system administrator”. If there are 100-150 employees, “junior sysadmin” or even “sysadmin assistant” will most probably define the position. 

Level 2: System administrators ($450-950)

“True” sysadmins do not configure personal computers. Instead, sysadmin duties include maintaining infrastructures (both physical and in-cloud) along with related equipment and software. The infrastructures can cover internal issues (holding customer data and processing transactions, for example) as well as external ones (web hosting, launching services, etc).

Even though the proposed salary still stands quite far from the DevOps level, the required sysadmin skills allow using the DevOps engineer title in job ads of many employers. Technology stacks may vary from case to case but typical sysadmin duties are the following:

• installation of servers and network devices;
• administration of the whole range of software such as operating systems (both Windows and Linux), virtualization systems (OpenVZ, Xen, Proxmox, Hyper-V, VMware, VirtualBox), databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL), network repositories along with local networks and VPN (PPTP, SSTP, OpenVPN), domain networks (Active Directory, DNS, DHCP), web servers (Apache, Nginx), email (Zimbra, Postfix, MS Exchange), IP telephony (Asterisk), CMS and corporate IT systems (Bitrix24), team development software (GitLab, Jira, Confluence), etc;
• Continuous automated monitoring (Zabbix, Dude, Alerta, Prometheus);
• Data backup and archiving;
• Automation of maintenance (by means of Bash or Python);
• Technical documentation development

The range of potential employers for such specialists is really huge. A set of tasks may differ depending on a certain specialization. Communication with customers, for instance, is present when the employer is a hosting provider. E-commerce projects may require skills in accounting software and cryptography-based security programs. Software development companies look for specs capable of creating development environments, etc.

Read also: DevOps as Service Providers and Why You Need Them

Level 3: SaaS infrastructure specs ($1200 – 2000)

This is when specialists start protesting against the “sysadmin” term in vacancy descriptions. The thing is in the level of responsibility: uninterrupted accessibility of distributed infrastructures is required. Specialists of such a level call themselves either “infrastructure engineers” or “system engineers”. Potential employers call them DevOps engineers oftentimes. Nonetheless, this position implies “sysadmins on steroids” rather than pure DevOps engineers. The job position requires some extra duties added to the ones indicated for level 2. 

• skills in containerization systems (Docker, Kubernetes);
• experience in distributed event streaming platforms (Apache Kafka);
• adjusting monitoring systems (Zabbix, Grafana);
• dealing with configuration management systems (Ansible).

Usually, those specialists are in demand for large companies that develop heavily loaded multi-user services such as e-commerce platforms, online cinemas, banks, and telecom providers. This is the level when sysadmin tasks can be easily confused with DevOps duties. Besides, the proposed salary stands close (if not overlaps) to the level of DevOps engineers. This could be the DevOps level if no next one was available.